In South Minneapolis, where a teenage Prince couch-surfed, performed, and dreamed up a diverse sound that revolutionized music, thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers still occupy the streets, even as the federal government says it is decreasing forces. By banding together, the people of this Midwestern city challenged the federal government’s actions, exposed their lawlessness, and perhaps showed the nation what a multiracial democracy looks like in the process.
Why has the administration targeted this place? Political retaliation? Certainly. Resentment over the growth of the immigrant population? Undeniable. But mainly, ICE strikes against a dynamic vision of shared American life exemplified in Prince’s music. Yes, the Purple One died in April 2016—before Trump was president, before COVID, before George Floyd. But his life and work permeate what’s going on in the Twin Cities today, offering a reminder that the city is at its best—its most harmonious—when it works together.
Prince’s “Minneapolis Sound” reflected how people and institutions in Minneapolis moved and changed alongside their city. Neighborhoods like South and Near North Minneapolis have been diversity hotspots since the 19th century, when a wave of Scandinavian, German, Russian, and Jewish immigrants, fleeing political division and declining economic opportunities in Europe, moved into the city. These migrants initially gathered around the mills, near the Mississippi River. Pillsbury’s “A” Mill Complex, the largest flour mill of its time, employed thousands of them.
As the mill economy declined in the early 20th century, immigrants moved away from the riverbanks and established communities in the north and south of town. Here, too, their community was marked by signs of cosmopolitanism: Scandinavian music halls, German butchers, synagogues. Left-of-center politics prevailed, expressed through the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, which lobbied for worker-friendly policies.
The immigrants’ white descendants began a gradual migration out of these neighborhoods when Black people from the South started to arrive, many between the World Wars. Like the Europeans before them, Black migrants came seeking access to the American dream. Like the earlier Jewish migrants to the city, they fled racist violence. And after struggling under Jim Crow, they faced hostility from white Minneapolitans.
White mobs and federal housing policies segregated the city along racial lines, confining Black people to specific neighborhoods. When Prince’s paternal grandparents moved from Northern Louisiana to South Minneapolis in the late 1920s, Black people made up a small part of the city’s population. By the time Prince was born in June 1958, most residents in his South Minneapolis neighborhood were Black.
Prince grew up in a racially segregated world that divided people and their music. In Near North and South Minneapolis, Black music like rhythm and blues and funk reigned. Downtown, a New York-inspired punk and indie-rock scene thrived in a handful of venues. But Prince, a virtuosic musician who appreciated both worlds, built a bridge, fusing the epic guitar riffs of rock with the basslines and percussive synthesizers of funk, the sparseness of punk, and the rhythms and falsetto vocals of R&B. In the late ’70s, he broke the color barrier that kept local Black artists out of these venues, including an old bus station that would become his musical laboratory in the 1980s, the renowned First Avenue & 7th Street Entry.
The Minneapolis Sound, born from the city’s fractured musical landscape, became its signature and influenced generations of popular music.
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Meanwhile, the city experienced a third immigration wave. This time, the newcomers came from countries around the world, including Somalia, Laos, Cambodia, China, and Mexico. Again, they landed in North and South Minneapolis. This time, fueled by liberal politics, Black support, and a hint of “Minnesota nice,” the Twin Cities supported immigrants, providing state assistance for housing, offering hiring incentives to employers, and supporting entrepreneurs through small-business loans.
Today, African, Asian, and Latin American people, mainly based in South and Near North Minneapolis, number nearly half a million, and constitute almost 9% of Minnesota’s population. George Floyd’s 2020 murder rebooted the city’s progressive politics, as communities focused on the ways racism informed policing, and worked together to create safety. That reckoning set the stage for the whistle-blowing, food and medical deliveries, and other acts of solidarity and resistance that took over the city in January. In targeting the city’s immigrant populations and then attacking and killing protestors, ICE waged war on the very neighborhoods that forged Prince, these crucibles of Minneapolis culture and civic life.
The agency is now also pursuing individuals in suburbs and small towns across the state: places more recent immigrants have moved in search of better jobs, affordable housing, and quality schools. ICE is expanding into St. Paul, where many Hmong residents live, into the first ring of suburbs surrounding the metro area, and into exurbs like Hopkins, where nearly 14% of the population is foreign-born, and Coon Rapids, whose Mexican, Somali, and Indian immigrants make up 10% of the population.
When I recently visited Minneapolis, ICE’s effect on the city was evident everywhere. “ICE OUT” signs and large posters of Alex Pretti and Renee Good cover walls and windows from the Near North Side to the South. I could feel ICE’s impact in my interactions with people. The Minnesota nice was even kinder, more caring: the hugs were tighter, the handshakes held longer, even the smiles from bartenders and waiters seemed more heartfelt. The sense of unity and kindness was deepened, no doubt, by seeing black SUVs roaming the streets, looking for prey. People were attuned to the knowledge that being out at all, and leaning into community at this time, could mean not making it back home.
But none of that has dampened citizens’ spirits. Instead, it’s strengthened them. Minneapolitans protesting ICE are defending their constitutional rights against illegal federal actions, but they are also safeguarding something deeper and more personal—their commitment to living in a multiracial city.
Terry Lewis, half of the super-producer duo “Jam & Lewis,” remarked long ago that “Minneapolis is totally out of touch with the rest of the country.” Its liberal politics, its support for immigrants, and its iconoclastic sound, pioneered by its favorite son, demonstrate Lewis’ point.
Prince understood this about his hometown. That’s why, when he could have left the city for the sunshine of L.A. or the media power of New York, he stayed loyal to it, living and working there for decades. He revered his city for its uniqueness.
His 1980 song “Uptown” captures this out-of-touch sentiment. Blending disco with Near North and Southside funk and downtown punk, over R&B-inspired falsetto vocals, Prince gave his hometown claim to an anthem.
“Now, where I come from/
we don’t let society tell us
how were supposed to be/
our clothes/
our hair/
we don’t care/
it’s all about being there/
everybody’s going/
uptown/
that’s where I wanna be/
uptown/
set your mind free.”
If the Trump administration manages to bring Prince’s Minneapolis to heel, other racially diverse communities that march to their own drum, shaping their lives as they see fit, will suffer the same fate.
Rashad Shabazz is an associate professor of geography and African American studies at Arizona State University whose latest book is Prince’s Minneapolis: A Biography of Sound & Place. He thanks South Minneapolis residents Janelle Austin and Stacy Fitzloff for their contributions to this piece.
Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard